Monthly Archives: March 2009

As Scott wrote this morning, Benjamin Netanyahu returned today to the prime ministership of Israel. Netanyahu worked feverishly to put together a broad coalition, and in the end was able to bring in the left-wing Labor party. These efforts have not stopped Israel’s Western enemies and other liberals from attempting to cast Netanyahu in the role of a right-wing, anti-peace zealot. In most MSM precincts you can’t read about the »

With 71 percent of precincts reporting, Republican Jim Tedisco is leading Democrat Scott Murphy by around 1,000 votes, less than a 1 percent margin. As usual, the Democrat is a multimillionaire, but even though enormous amounts of money have spent, turnout is relatively low. UPDATE: WIth 92 percent of the precincts in, Murphy has taken what looks like a pretty solid lead, 51-49 percent, 1,600 votes. WOW: With 100 percent »

Voters in New York’s 20th congressional district will select their new representative today. The seat in question was held by Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand (the fake gun-rights supporter, or is it the fake gun control supporter?) until Gillibrand was selected to fill Hillary Clinton’s Senate spot. The two contenders are Democrat Scott Murphy and Republican Jim Tedisco. Much attention has been paid to this race, which is seen as an early »

We covered the 2008 Miss Universe pageant here, here, here and here. If that seems excessive, all I can say is, follow the links. Miss Venezuela, Dayana Mendoza, won the contest. As the last-linked post above noted, Ms. Mendoza’s relations with Hugo Chavez were apparently somewhat frosty, and he did not congratulate her on her victory. Now Miss Mendoza, who is enjoying her year as Miss Universe, has surfaced once »

You can’t make this stuff up. From today’s New York Times Corrections section: Because of editing errors, an article on Monday about questions likely to be raised in the trial of Anthony Marshall, the son of Brooke Astor, and one of her lawyers on charges of conspiracy and scheming to defraud in connection with her estate misidentified her father-in-law and referred imprecisely to the source of his fortune. He was »

The London Times, anticipating Barack Obama’s visit to Europe, writes: The White House was rocked yesterday by claims that the daughter of Joe Biden, the Vice-President, was shown on video snorting cocaine. The video purports to show Ashley Biden, 27, snorting lines of white powder at a house party in her home state of Delaware. It surfaced days after Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, declared that the United »

One of the defining features of the Obama administration so far is its almost pathological inability to make hard choices–or even to acknowledge that hard choices need to be made. A prime example is the administration’s insistence that making energy more expensive will somehow benefit our economy. This proposition is so foolish as to be almost self-refuting: in my view, anyone who doesn’t understand that you can’t create wealth by »

Hillary Clinton confirmed a day or two ago that the Obama administration will no longer refer to the “war on terror.” That isn’t necessarily a bad thing; most conservatives were never very happy with that formula (although I, for one, wasn’t able to come up with a better one). The problem is that this looks like one more instance of the Obama administration putting too much emphasis on words rather »

Winston Churchill’s return to the Admiralty in 1939 prompted the signal to go out to the British fleet: “Winston’s back.” Today Benjamin Netanyahu returns to the prime ministership of Israel. While President Obama and much of the rest of the West appear to be sleepwalking toward Iran, Netanyahu views Iran with great urgency as an existential threat to Israel. In his November 2006 interview with Glenn Beck (below), the echoes »

The University of Notre Dame has invited President Obama to speak at its commencement ceremonies. Obama has accepted the invitation. At the ceremonies, as is the custom, Notre Dame will award him an honorary degree. Notre Dame, of course, is a Catholic institution. The Catholic Church has always condemned abortion as a grave evil. President Obama, by contrast, believes that woman should be able to have abortions on demand. So »

The Obama administration continues to populate top positions at the Justice Department with left-wing lawyers. In the latest instance, it has nominated Tom Perez to head the Civil Rights Division. Perez was selected after President Obama’s original choice, Thomas Saenz, ran into fierce opposition due to his efforts on behalf of illegal aliens. However, as Linda Chavez shows, Perez is also a radical choice, given his advocacy for racial preferences »

In this editorial, the Washington Post assures its readers that, in seeking to “reset” U.S. relations with Russia, President Obama is not simply going to capitulate across-the-board to Russian demands. At one level, it’s remarkable that the Post would see the need to write such an editorial. But that doesn’t mean the Post is wrong to perceive that need. The Post cites Obama’s statement that even as the U.S. seeks »

To the editor: Freeman Dyson joins a long list of science “heretics” — Copernicus and Galileo are two — who proved to be right against a false consensus of scientific belief. While Einstein and Bohr had headline grabbing civilized discussions, often described as debates, on Bohr’s theory of quantum mechanics, any attempt in today’s world to conduct a learned discussion of global warming, or cooling, or CO2 is met with »

Ted Bromund and Daniella Markheim of the Heritage Foundation debunk the EU narrative regarding the current global financial crisis. According to that narrative, the crisis is the fault of the United States, not Europe. This premise provides the rationale for resisting President Obama’s call on European nations to enact aggressive stimulus programs. Why should they go further into debt to revive the economy of the nation that caused the crisis, »

The United States may have taken a major step toward corporatism today–an economic philosophy more reminiscent of Italy in the 1930s than of American free enterprise (although, to be fair, there were significant corporatist elements in Roosevelt’s New Deal, too). I’m not sure whether Barack Obama ever ran a lemonade stand as a child, but if he did, it would be his most salient business experience. Nevertheless, in his apparently »

Glenn Reynolds has adopted the refrain commenting on Obama administration missteps: “The country’s in the very best of hands….” It comes from the lyrics Johnny Mercer wrote for the 1956 Broadway musical “Li’l Abner.” (Gene de Paul wrote the music.) The show was successful on Broadway, but the show’s songs failed to produce a single hit and the show itself has not had much of an afterlife. In his biography »

Nicholas Dawidoff’s cover story/profile of Freeman Dyson in the New York Times Magazine characterizes Dyson as “The civil heretic.” Dyson is the distinguished scientist who has spent most of his life at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of essays that are published in the New York Review of Books and of books that win the approval of the New York Times. For the past »